China and India TDWU: Sales in Both Countries Fall, Although Toyota Fortuner and Innova Sales Increase

Sales for Toyota continue to fall in China, as tensions between them and Japan began to slowly ease. In case you are new to TDWU, Japan caused quite a stir earlier this year, whenever they decided to nationalise two islands in the East China Sea, by purchasing them from their owners.

More specifically, total sales for the Japanese heavyweight came in at around 60,000 vehicles last month, a significant drop compared to November of last year, which registered at 81,800 total units. These numbers represent what Toyota and its partners were able to move through their dealerships, which are being to recover from protestors vandalising their properties. Despite this, most would-be Chinese buyers are still staying away from them , although Toyota still insists that sales and production will resume their pre-September totals sometime next year. In addition to production and sales dropping, the overall Japanese market share in China dropped from 19 percent, to 17 percent.

Moreover, sales in India, another potentially huge market like China (but without the infrastructure), have dropped 26 percent to 10,352 units for the month of November. However, the reasons for the sudden drop in sales are due to some of the production facilities being shut down for 15 days last month. This was necessitated so that Toyota could began ramping up for additional production.

The main vehicle to experience a loss of sales was the Toyota Ethios Series, which plummeted from 8,271 units last November, to 4,231 units. Although with the Toyota Ethios, the Corolla Altis and Camry saw significant drops in sales as well, but all three were a part of the aforementioned production facility that was shut down for half of the month.

Conversely, sales for their utility vehicles, such as the Toyota Innova and the Toyota Fortuner, remained strong. This is despite the fact that their production facility was shut down for 10 days, also for the same reason. More specifically, sales for the Toyota Innova improved by nine percent to 4,682 units, while the Toyota Fortuner increased by a whopping 19 percent to 1,025 units. Utility vehicles are very popular in places like India, as they slowly began to modernise their infrastructure to accomodate all types of vehicles.

Toyota is ramping up their production in anticipation of the market growing in the first quarter of the next year, and hope to increase their total production numbers from 2,10,000 to 3,10,000. With that being said, Toyota will have to still contend with Maruti Suzuki, currently the top selling automaker in India.